gravity
by shiksa goddess
Summary: He laughs in spite of it all, and slips his hand over hers. "Of course you're beautiful. You've always been beautiful." / Or, the story of a girl, an eating disorder, and the boy who wouldn't let her go. Auslly, angst.


**Title: gravity**

**playlist/inspiration: Annie- SafetySuit, Show Me What I'm Looking For- Carolina Liar, Beautiful Disaster- Jon McLaughlin, Gravity- Sara Barellies**

**Disclaimer: I do not own. **

**Warnings: potential triggers, ooc, angst.**

Really though, she has no clue how this all started.

Living in Florida, water was not an uncommon sight. But, sitting at this waterfront restaurant with her father, pushing around the food she was refusing to eat, she stared at the sparkling blue gulf, with the sun, getting ready to set, shining over everything and illuminating that part of the world for a moment, she had this sensation of desperately wanting to _jump. _

It's not really that she wants to die. She just doesn't want to be here, to be her anymore.

Throwing herself over the balcony, landing in the water and not having to do anything except let herself sink, it was a wonderful thought.

However, the part of her that was still Ally Dawson, the part that had not yet been attacked by the demons of her mind, told her that throwing herself over the edge would be terribly inappropriate.

After all, she was fully clothed, and that would be indecent.

Maybe another day.

/

The next time she sees this water, about two weeks later, she is again fully clothed and Austin has his arm around her shoulders.

It's early in the afternoon. Saturday. For March in Florida, the air is unusually chilly, but she enjoys the feeling of the brisk air on her skin.

The sun is shining over the turquoise waters as usual, illuminating her brown eyes.

"Isn't it beautiful?" She whispers softly. Austin nods.

"Have you ever just wanted to jump in?"

He stares at her abruptly. "No. Not without a lifejacket or something. I'd probably end up dying. Why, do you?"

"Yes. And someday, I'll do it."

This is the moment where he starts to get worried. But he doesn't want to say anything, so he doesn't. Instead, he takes her hand in his own and squeezes it once.

"Not if I can help it."

They stand in silence for a moment, seagulls cawing behind them, flocking around a piece of dead fish.

"Ally?" He says meekly. When she turns to face him, he stares straight into her eyes, searching for the girl who he knows as Ally Dawson, the girl who is his best friend, the girl who is happy.

She's not there.

/

She's not sure how it all started, but if she were to pinpoint a moment, she would choose this one.

She's just finished another song, another happy pop tune that would chart on Billboard's Top 200 but would never stir her emotions. He walks in with a new copy of _Tiger Beat, _one that features his newest promotional photo-shoot.

"Isn't it great? Kyla looks hot, right? I was thinking about asking her out, but turns out she has a boyfriend, so whatever." He tells her, smirk widely displayed on his face.

She nods, picking up the magazine and observing the photos. " It looks awesome!" She grins. "I'll put it on the wall."

While she cuts out and tacks the photos to the wall in the back of the practice room, the one plastered with any photo-shoot or fan-photo they'd taken, she starts noticing a pattern.

Not counting the two with her, every girl Austin's ever taken a photo with is stick-skinny. Tall, flawlessly complexioned, and skinny.

She wants to be those girls. She wants Austin-or anyone, really, but mostly Austin- to call her hot, and she wants to be desirable and gorgeous, a girl worthy of a pop star like Austin Moon.

Suddenly, this becomes a mission: become skinny.

And Ally Dawson was nothing if not a hard worker.

/

Five days after she starts her mission, Trish gets a new boyfriend. And Ally smiles and congratulates her and, because it is inevitable, starts to hate herself a little more because of it.

See, it's a part of her plan- criticize, never compliment. Not only did she not deserve compliments, but compliments would make her feel more secure with the way she was, and she needed to change who she was. So criticism it was.

Of course Trish got a boyfriend. Trish was beautiful. Trish was confident and bold and social and got invited to parties and Ally was a shrinking violet, which was the way it was and that was the way it always had been.

That afternoon, she starts the tune to a new song and upholds lively conversations with her blonde best friend, but to him, she seems different. Just a little though.

"Are you okay?"

She nods exuberantly, reassuringly.

"Of course. Why wouldn't I be okay?"

He frowns. "I don't know. You just seem a bit off today. And you're always going around and caring about everyone else, but I just want you to know that someone cares about you, too."

Smiling softly, she wraps her (not-quite-thin-enough) arms around his neck.

"Thank you. But yeah, I'm okay. I promise."

In that moment, she really believes it, too. That she's okay. Because she's _Ally_, she was the one that everyone came to with their problems, not the other way around.

Ally Dawson was not the broken one.

She was okay. She was always okay. It was kind of her specialty.

/

(Turns out she's not okay.)

/

Whenever she sees herself in the mirror, it is always fat, fat, and fat.

_You've got to work harder, Ally. _She tells herself. She's been working _so _hard, going to the gyms for forty minutes every day, then eating one carrot and two slices of apple and maybe, if she'd done enough at the gym that day, she'd allow herself a piece of whole-grain toast.

She weighs herself: 96

It's not enough, she knows. It's never enough.

Calculating it quickly in her head, she figures that if she amps it up to fifty minutes a day at the gym, and if she cuts the toast completely, and maybe just _one _apple slice instead of two, she'll reach her goal in oh, three weeks maybe?

Maybe she'll finally be good enough.

/

He walks in with two McDonald's cups in his hands and sets one down on the piano in front of her.

"Shamrock shake." He explains, taking a sip of his own.

"It's really good." He offers, holding hers straight in front of her face.

She licks her lips, but she's become immune to the temptation. No food is worth giving up all the hard work she's been putting into this for the past two weeks.

However, one of the biggest things about this plan is that it has to stay secret for it to work.

So she takes the cup from his hands, sticks the straw in her mouth and pretends to sip, then places it back on the piano.

"Thanks." She laughs. "I'd drink more right now, but I'm really trying to just crank this song out."

He sits down next to her on the bench. "Awesome! Can I hear it?"

She smirks. "Nope. It's a secret."

After all, she's been keeping a ton of those lately.

/

The next week, February has dissolved into March and she is down four pounds. Twelve pounds away from her goal, twelve pounds away from skinny, the closest to perfect she could ever get.

No one's noticed yet. Of course, though, no one ever noticed Ally Dawson.

/

March 5th, she remembers the date clearly. That was the day he got a girlfriend. A cute, happy, _skinny _girlfriend.

It's not as if she wasn't used to this. Her best friend picked up a new girl every other week.

It was just that, someday, she wanted to _be _one of those girls. And not just one, she wanted to be _his _girl, the one he'd stay with and love forever.

Only ten pounds away.

/

She's not herself. He can see that, anyone could.

Ever since that day at the water, the day she'd talked about jumping, he'd gotten scared. She was falling slowly, out of his grasp, out of his world. The girl that had once been his lively, goofy best friend- she was gone.

"Austin! Are you listening?" Mari snaps.

He returns his focus to his girlfriend. "Yeah, yeah. I'm here."

Mari purses her lips. "I think we should break up."

His eyes widen. "Why?"

"Because, you're never here! Your mind is always somewhere else, thinking about something that you clearly think is more important than me. So we're over." Tears well up in her eyes, and he immediately fills with guilt. She was a nice girl, and she obviously liked him And he liked her too, it was just... Ally. It was _always _Ally.

Somehow, she had taken precedence over everything and anyone else in his life and he couldn't tell if it was annoying or wonderful.

(He leaned more towards the wonderful side.)

He watched Mari walk away, feeling as if he should run after her or something, but he didn't. All he could think about was Ally.

/

March 12th. She was eighty-eight pounds, eight pounds away from her goal.

Staring at herself in the mirror, she noticed her ribs protruding through her shirt, something she hadn't seen since third grade.

She frowned a moment. Was that supposed to happen? It didn't seem very pretty.

She shrugged it off. If this was what it looked like to be skinny, then she could be happy with it.

Yeah. She could be _happy. _That sounded nice.

It was then that she decided that she wasn't doing this for Austin anymore. Maybe she never had been.

She was doing this for herself.

/

On March 14th, she falls, both metaphorically and literally.

She attempts getting out of bed to get to the gym, but as soon as her feet hit her bedroom carpet, her legs buckle underneath her and she falls.

At first, she thinks something like "wow, I'm still so fat, my legs can't even carry me" but then she can't think much of anything and she just _laughs. _

She laughs for all the pretty she'll never be, and all the songs she'll never write and all the life she's not going to get a chance to live and suddenly it dawns on her that she very well may have just killed herself.

So she laughs even harder, because she's so far from perfect anyways, and hell, it's burning calories, right?

The door opens, and it gives her a mini-heart attack. Her father wasn't supposed to be home from the business seminar until Tuesday.

"Ally?"

Oh, God. It's Austin.

She tries to say 'I'm in here', but first of all, she can't seem to form the words and also, she's not sure she wants anyone to find her.

So she closes her eyes.

"I'm ready." She whispers.

/

When he finds her, she's unconscious.

"Ally?" He squeaks, knowing she wouldn't respond.

Kneeling down next to her, he grabs her hand shakily.

"I hate myself." He says, hot tears starting to trail their way down his face.

"I hate that I let this happen to you. I hate that I didn't do anything, that none of us did anything. You deserve better than that."

Her chest rises and falls slowly, the only sign that tells him that she's still alive.

"The ambulance is on its way, okay?" He says through sobs. "And they're- they're going to take you, and you're going to get better, okay? You're gonna live. You're going to live, because I never got to tell you that I love you. And I never got to kiss you, or give you flowers on Valentine's Day, and because I'm too selfish to let you go. I still need you, Ally, and you care about me too much to let go, right? And I care about you too much to let you go. I'm keeping you here."

Her chest continues to rise and fall, and he clings onto her, as if she were a free faller and he was the gravity, desperately holding her to Earth as she flew far, far away.

/

The ambulance whirs by houses and streets and it's all just a blur of color, really.

Two blocks away from the hospital, her eyes gingerly flutter open and he _swears _he can feel his heart stop beating.

As the EMT's and paramedics flock her, making sure she has what she needs to stay alive until they get to the hospital, she looks over and smiles at him.

"Am I beautiful yet?" She asks meekly.

He laughs in spite of it all, and slips his hand over hers. "Of course you're beautiful. You've always been beautiful."

And for once, she believes it.

/

:fin:

**A/N: oh my god. I honestly do not think I could hate this any more than I do. **

**Ugh okay but seriously I've wanted to write a story like this for like over a year and it turned out like this and it shames me. **

**Okay yeah have we established that I like writing about heavy topics? Because apparently I do. I tried portraying this in a delicate yet honest way, so I hope that at least came out okay. **

**asdfghjkl glag okay Tessa is done. **


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